Depression

People that scored high on depression listened to higher valence music. This seems contradictory, but research shows that happy music isn’t only for happy people.

Anxiety

Anxious people seem to listen more to contemporary music, but stressed people do not. What can be said about this?

Stress

If you are stressed, what kind of music do you prefer? The stressed people in our research showed some preferences, that might help you unwind as well

Happiness

What kind of music do happy people listen to? Even if you’re happy, you might not know the answer, but Spotify provides us with some interesting insights.

From the theory it follows that there should be some kind of relationship between psychological characteristics and the music people listen to. Although Spotify features are vague and nobody really knows what they mean (including Spotify themselves), they do provide us with interesting statistics on music. To analyse the On Repeat playlists the participants provided us with, we calculated the mean for the Spotify features of every playlist. We then compared these features to the participant’s score on the four psychology questionnaires. What will the songs people listen to on Spotify tell us about their emotional states, and conversely, what will their emotional states tell us about what music they listen to?

To find the patterns, we calculated the correlation between the scores on the questionnaires and the Spotify features. All the significant correlations (below -0.1 and above 0.1) are shown on the left. There seem to be relationships- more happy and anxious people like to listen to more speechy music. Higher depression scores seem to imply lower values of most features, but also liveness- do depressed people dislike concerts or is there something else going on?

Research conducted by Stewart et al. (2019) found that young adults use music to deal with depression both through listening to music that differs from their mood (in an attempt to raise spirits), as well as through music that matches their (negative) feelings. Our research showed that those who were depressed tended to avoid low valence songs, with there being a strong correlation between depression and valence.
They also tended to listen to more rock, alternative and punk music.

This can be seen in the graph on the left. People’s score for depression are plotted against their mean valence, with a regression line. As you can see, people scoring higher on depression score higher on valence.

In the second tab, we see the same plot, but with groups for gender.

Our results show that people who are more anxious have been listening more to contemporary music, as can be seen in the graph on the right. People with a higher anxiety score reported listening more to funk, reggae, gospel, soul and r&b. Even though previous research has shown that relaxing music can reduce anxiety, we found no significant relation between anxiety and Spotify features such as energy, loudness and tempo (Knight & Rickard, 2001; Davis & Thaut 1989). You can see this in the top left graph.

Interesting finding / Point of discussion: The World Health Organization estimates about 20% of the western pacific region to have an anxiety disorder (WHO, 2017). However, in our sample, 25% had severe anxiety and 66.7% had extremely severe anxiety. This might be explained by the fact that our survey was conducted during the Corona crisis. Psychologists have speculated about how this crisis could result in an increase in several disorders including anxiety (Kluger, 2020). One could wonder, though, how quickly people adjust their music listening habits to their state of mind.

There has been a lot of research into the relation between music listening and stress. However, little of this research was conducted on the stress-reducing effect of music listening in everyday life. Sandstrom & Russo (2010) found that peaceful music (positive valence and low-arousal music) promoted better recovery from an acute stressor. According to Linnemann et al. (2015), there is a relation between music listening and stress-reduction in daily life. Music listening especially has a stress-reducing effect when the reason for listening to music was relaxation. They also found that listening to music for distraction increased stress levels.

The instrumentalness plot shows that people that scored higher on stress had higher instrumentalness scores. There is also a high correlation between the stress score and valence. Together this corresponds with the results of Sandstrom & Russo (2010) and thus our research confirms that people with higher stress scores listen to more peaceful music.

The second tab shows a plot of the stress scores plotted against the STOMP scores. It shows that the higher the stress scores, the higher the score for sophisticated music is. So generally, people start to listen to more sophisticated music when they get more stressed. The same goes for unpretentious music. The scores for contemporary music are quite high for all stress scores, even though there is a slight decrease when the stress score gets higher.

First and foremost, despite everything, people still are quite happy! The majority of our sample scored either average or high on happiness (bottom left graph).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, our data suggest that establishing clear music listening patterns for happy people is quite difficult (upper left graph). The strongest and most interesting finding was valence. Contrary to what we expected, we found a negative correlation between valence and happiness (the main graph). It has been extensively discussed why unhappy people would listen to sad music, but our research extends this seemingly strange phenomenon, and suggests that the happier the people are, the sadder their playlists get. This might be explained by the difference between perceived emotions and felt emotions. Kawakami et al. (2013) found that though people report perceiving sad excerpts as more tragic, the simultaneous experience is often reported as romantic and otherwise pleasant. Thus, though low on valence, such music might coincide with positive emotions. However, further research is necessary to test this.

What is known so far?

Music can elicit positive and negative emotions, and can also be a tool for emotion regulation. (Cook et al, 2018)

Studies have found a relationship between various genres of music (rock, metal, hip hop) and behaviours, such as antisocial behaviour, vulnerability to suicide, and drug use. (Scherer et al., 2001)

Music preference is indicative of an underlying emotional disturbance or vulnerability (Scherer et al., 2001)

Through cognitive appraisal, the aesthetic context of music is recognized and emotions are induced (Kawakami, Furukawa, Katahira & Okanoya, 2013).

Another study found out why sad music exists in the first place (Kawakami, Furukawa, Katahira & Okanoya, 2013). They found that when listening to sad music, people’s felt emotions are different from the perceived emotions. One of their explanations for this was that people felt pleasant emotions when listening to sad music due to something called sweet anticipation. People expected to feel sad emotions and due to having successfully predicted this, they experienced pleasant emotions. This comes back to mood adjustment; it implies that people listen to sad music on purpose to feel sad emotions. Two of the same researchers also researched if personality traits relate to people’s consumption of sad music (Kawakami & Katahira, 2015). They found that several sub-components of the personality trait empathy were positively related to the consumption of sad music.

References

References

Cook, T., Roy, A. R. K., & Welker, K. M. (2019). Music as an emotion regulation strategy: An examination of genres of music and their roles in emotion regulation. Psychology of Music, 47(1), 144–154.

Davis, W. B., & Thaut, M. H. (1989). The Influence of Preferred Relaxing Music on Measures of State Anxiety, Relaxation, and Physiological Responses. Journal of Music Therapy, 26(4), 168–187. doi: 10.1093/jmt/26.4.168

Get Audio Features for a Track. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/tracks/get-audio-features/

Kawakami, A., Furukawa, K., Katahira, K., & Okanoya, K. (2013). Sad music induces pleasant emotion. Frontiers in Psychology, 4. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00311

Kawakami, A., & Katahira, K. (2015). Influence of trait empathy on the emotion evoked by sad music and on the preference for it. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01541

Kluger, J. (2020, March 26). The Coronavirus Pandemic May Be Causing an Anxiety Pandemic. Time. Retrieved from https://time.com/5808278/coronavirus-anxiety/

Knight, W. E. J., & Rickard, N. S. (2001). Relaxing Music Prevents Stress-Induced Increases in Subjective Anxiety, Systolic Blood Pressure, and Heart Rate in Healthy Males and Females. Journal of Music Therapy, 38(4), 254–272. doi: 10.1093/jmt/38.4.254

Linnemann, A., Ditzen, B., Strahler, J., Doerr, J. M., & Nater, U. M. (2015). Music listening as a means of stress reduction in daily life. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 60, 82–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2015.06.008

Sandstrom, G. M., & Russo, F. A. (2010). Music Hath Charms: The Effects of Valence and Arousal on Recovery Following an Acute Stressor. Music and Medicine, 2(3), 137–143. https://doi.org/10.1177/1943862110371486

Scherer, K. R. (2004). Which emotions can be induced by music? What are the underlying mechanisms? And how can we measure them?. Journal of new music research, 33(3), 239-251.

Stewart, J., Garrido, S., Hense, C., & McFerran, K. (2019). Music Use for Mood Regulation: Self-Awareness and Conscious Listening Choices in Young People With Tendencies to Depression. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01199

World Health Organization. (2017, February). Depression and Other Common Mental Disorders.Retrieved May 4, 2020, from https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/254610/WHO-MSD-MER-2017.2-eng.pdf;jsessionid=3C066D350D7C8E8630F9F3DF6844E976?sequence=1